


Choices We Make

by fluffywonder



Series: Patterns We Break [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen, Iron Man 2, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 12:14:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18637924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffywonder/pseuds/fluffywonder
Summary: The 5 lessons Natasha learns throughout her life, and 1 that Tony teaches her, which leads her to make a very pivotal choice.IronWidow endgame. (Iron Man 2 fix-it)





	Choices We Make

**Author's Note:**

> Natasha and Tony just get each other.

She is three when she learns that people are selfish, and only care about themselves. They only care about what you can do for them, and not about you. 

She learns this in harsh words her first trainers spit at her, while she cries out and pulls at the handcuffs that chain her to the bed. She learns that her desperate father had sold her to the program for a pretty pouch of change. She learns that her mother was too sick to protest or do anything about it.

_“Красный комната. ваш новый дом.”_

_This is Red Room. Your new home._

She learns quickly that she is not going to find  _family_ here, in this home. Instead, she learns that she is the program’s newest  _asset_ , and even at three, she knows that the word means ‘tool’.

——

She is four when she learns to fear water.  _Conditioning_ , they call it. They tell her she will have to learn to survive in extreme situations and harsh weather, often while underdressed. They murmur almost kindly that it is better she prepare herself for the discomfort now, in a controlled environment. 

_“это только кондиционирование, наталья.”_

_It is only conditioning, Natalia._

She quickly learns that conditioning is really just a another word for torture, as her handlers press her down into full tubs of ice-cold water for first seconds, then increasing minutes at a time. She can feel her extremities getting number and number, can feel her red hair flying around, weightless in the water and just visible in her periphery. She learns to lock her jaw and not cry out after one too many times of feeling her throat burn something fierce and tears stinging her eyes and watching bubbles stream out of her mouth ineffectively. As fog descends over her mind and she stares up at the wavering but impassive faces of her teachers, the only thing that pierces through her increasingly blurry, muddled thought processes is whether her Mamma will be happy to see her again.

She cannot remember anything after that, but suddenly she is out of the water, being slapped awake and roughly wiped dry. She chokes back a cry as the horrible feeling of pins and needles running all across her skin makes itself known to her, and she becomes immediately aware that she can taste blood in her mouth. It confuses her— oh. Oh, she had bitten her tongue in an effort to keep her mouth shut underwater. She swallows the blood down with great difficulty, aware that spitting it out would only earn her a severe backhand -or worse- for her troubles. Even as shudders wrack her thin little frame, and her hair is half hanging in front of her eyes, she can see the tub being drained, and she knows what is coming. The tub will be refilled, and she will be put back in it — except the water will be hot this time, boiling hot, hot enough to blister her skin raw and leave it red for days afterwards. They avoid leaving actual burns, but it is a near thing. They will not hold her down, this time; they will expect her to stay in of her own accord, as they test her will and obedience. And she will stay, sunk in the blistering water, her face the only part of her allowed to remain unexposed. She will stay, even if she makes pained noises and tears roll down her face at the fire licking up her limbs, because she knows what will happen if she does not — she does not care to repeat what happened the first and only time she scrambled out of the water. 

——

She is seven when she learns about survival of the fittest. It is her first time — she wouldn’t get to just watch anymore.

_“наталья. убить или быть убитым. это первое правило.”_

_Kill or be killed — this is the first rule._

She wanted to survive. She wasn’t ready to die, wasn’t ready to join Mamma and Papa yet — but could she do it? Could she kill someone else? Another little girl, her own age? The kind of girl she could once have made friends with, played marbles with in another life?

But then this girl slams her head against the floor, even as a terrified whimper escapes her lips. The hit is not as hard as it could be, but Natalia’s mind still goes muzzy, and her vision is swimming, but she manages to speak, a low mutter.

_“Мне очень жаль, что так получилось.”_

_I’m sorry that this happened._

But she’s not sorry for what she does next. Because she could not be sorry for her own survival — Mamma and Papa would have wanted her to survive, wouldn’t they? She could not be sorry for hitting as hard as she could, for striking out where she knew it would hurt most. She could not apologize for digging her fingers into her opponent’s neck harder, even after she hears choking, because Madame B and Madame Elena are watching, and failure is not tolerated. Failure means pain. More pain. Because there hasn’t been enough already. As she continues to keep her opponent trapped beneath her, she has the grim thought that if the other girl had been any good, she would have avoided failure. 

So she could not be sorry for doing what she had to, but she thinks she could be kind while doing it. So she cradles the head, a little, strokes a hand gently through hair while she squeezes the throat and presses a sharp knee into the other girl’s abdomen. She ignores the face turning purple, the aborted cries for  _Mama!_ beneath her. 

Madame Elena congratulates her. They notice her attempt at kindness, and decide it can be useful. She is not punished for trying to be kind to the girl  ( _Yulia_ ,  her brain reminds her.  _Her name was Yulia_ ), but she does not realize why she escapes pain until far later, and when she does, it nearly makes her sick. The Madames had realized what she had not — that being kind while eliminating her opponent was just a special kind of cruel, in many ways worse than an emotionless end. In trying to make things easier for  _Yulia,_ she might have only made things harder. 

Her trainers decide that her ability to be emotional yet controlled while killing means she can be put to different uses than mindless enforcer, and she is given a knife and trained with the boys soon after that. She learns quickly that her disingenuous softness and kindness endears her to her male targets, and all she has to do is spread her legs even as she slits their throats.

——

She is eight, closer to nine, when she learns everything she needs to know about sex. It is cold and clinical when a Red Room nurse hands her a wheel full of birth control pills accompanied by a crisp sheet of instructions and a dire warning not to fail until she is old enough for her graduation sterilization procedure.

Then she is shuttled along to classes where she learns that sex is a tool, to be used as a means to an end. Pleasure does not matter, hers or his, because in the end, it is not to be a climax, but blood that is spilled over the sheets. She knows to remain in control of the experience, to never let the moment sweep her away, and to take her shot at the very first available opportunity. It is completely calculated, though the men in her bed do not realize it until the very moment of the end. 

So that she appreciates the need to maintain iron control during sexual encounters, she first has to learn what it is like to not have any. She is treated to training sessions, in which the unwritten rule is that if she cannot beat the boys, if she cannot knock them unconscious, then they get to have their way with her. 

She learns quickly not to lose, and gains a fearsome reputation in the process.

But then the men come, a whole different breed than the boys. She recognizes some of them as trainers around the facility, while others must be guests. Either way, they come, in the dead of the night, stripping her thin clothes off her body and appreciatively eyeing the handcuffs attached to her arms and the bed. Every time they push their bluntness past her folds, it is all she can do to not sob out loud in pain and shock and fear — but she doesn’t. She won’t. She knows better than to invite retribution. The men whisper many things about how she’s so pretty, and she just needs to get used to it, but—

—but the first time it happens, it breaks something inside of her, in a way that previous training has not, and she cries all night. By morning, when she is alone again, she has firmly internalized the lesson, has learned there is no pleasure in sex, not for her.

She also grasps what she did not quite understand at the age of three: that to be the Red Room’s ‘asset’ means to be their  _property —_  in every way possible.

——

She is fourteen when she learns to fear medical procedures, learns to fear needles and drugs and sharp tools and implements that could alter her, change her, break her and remake her. The medical bay is a familiar sight, she has been subjected to various harmless, painless tests for years now, all the girls have — every time they dunk her in freezing cold water and then in boiling, they conduct stress tests and monitor her vital organs for a period of a few days afterwards, all the while muttering that she is strong.

She learns quickly that in the Red Room, being strong means being alive.

It also means being eligible for the Russian variant of the super soldier serum. Her resilience, in conjunction with her skills as a seductress and a fighter, make her one of the first candidates to be given the serum. She hears the whispers, and she knows the other girls are jealous of her — have been for years, really. Too many of them are still little girls, she thinks, entertaining fantasies of success and glory when they should be focused on survival. Then again, she will reflect later, too many of them are still little girls.

As she sits hunched in a cold bed in the medical center, the serum bites through her, veins and bones and muscles and mind, picking apart and strengthening and rewiring everything, making her tougher, stronger, faster,  _better._  She does not learn until much later that the serum had also increased her suggestibility and compliance. All she knows is that she is in more suffering than she can imagine, and that she only survives the procedure because she has unparalleled resolve. It is the same resolve that earns her the privilege of being the very first Red Room trainee to bear the honorable title of Black Widow.

Her graduation procedure three years later, at seventeen, only cements this fear of white rooms and unknown needles. 

_They will keep you alive - but at what cost?_

It is a cold whisper of truth that slinks into her mind — that they will always hold her body hostage, and thus hold control over her. That they will always ensure her survival, but cost her her life in the process. She tries to sabotage herself, to slow down her training, to purposefully mess up, but Madame B is too shrewd and simply tells her she is better than that.

_“это должно быть сделано, наталья, если вы хотите занять свое место в этом мире.”_

_It must be done, Natalia, if you are to take your place in this world._

——

She is twenty-seven when she learns that if only she leaves her preconceived notions behind her, a job could change her life in more ways than the usual. She is twenty-seven when she looks at Tony Stark, and sees for the first time that when you look into an abyss, it also stares back into you.

_Perhaps she’s just never had such a clever mark - or perhaps she’s just never seen herself as clearly as she likes to think._

For all that she has been pieced together out of masks, she forgets, too often, that others  - _civilians_ who are not agents or spies- may wear them too. So she pries into him, his life, and she underestimates him at first, content to put together the expected report encompassing all his narcissistic, erratic, wild child tendencies.

But then, when the  _dying_ genius billionaire playboy philanthropist asks her what she would do if it were her last party, that’s when she sees — he is nothing and everything like her.

She sees the threads of betrayal crisscrossing through his mind  _(Howard, Obie)._ She thinks she understands the feeling of the people you love pulling your heart from your chest, because they got greedy, because they never really saw your worth as a person, because they never just wanted and treasured and cherished  _you._

She sees the lack of bathtubs and swimming pools around the tower, and she sees in his eyes, in the shadows of his face, that bone-deep terror of water.

She knows he stares long into the night, watching burning villages decimated by Stark weaponry, acknowledging the deaths he had a hand in, and the ledger that lays at his feet. 

She sees the models he invites over, and the love he does not feel. She sees Pepper kick them out in the morning, she sees the control he does not yield.

She sees the way his hand curls defensively around his arc reactor. She thinks of surgery performed unwillingly in a cave, without anasthetic. She thinks of nothing but excruciating horror scorching his veins. She thinks of how it had to be done, before Iron Man could take his place in the world.

She cannot unsee it, and it makes sense to her when it doesn’t work out with Pepper Potts on a rooftop far away, because Pepper may know, but she does not  _understand_ exactly how broken this man is.

In the Red Room, little Natalia knew that failure meant pain, and betrayal meant death. She is still not sure what the consequences of insubordination are, here at SHIELD, but Clint had assured her that she had nothing to fear. Still, a mark is a mark, a job is a job, and an order is an order, and she had never seen any reason to disobey Nick Fury.

Until now. Until Tony Stark. Because this man, Natalia thinks, might be worth disobeying an order for, the order to inject him with the syringe in her pocket. Because while SHIELD is a sanctuary, it is not a life. It is not coming home. It does not represent the sense of family that was taken from a three year old girl. And... she thinks Tony might, because he is as perceptive as her, has been cataloguing her all this time too. SHIELD does not see beyond Black Widow, and Clint knows Natasha Romanoff, but Tony Stark sees little Natalia Romanova. 

She is terrified, because  _everything_ feels out of her control now, but she tells him anyway. She tells him because Tony is the first to be able to  see.

She tells him about Natalie Rushman, about Fury’s games, about Howard Stark’s video, about the lithium dioxide injection in her pocket (and she notes the sheer relief in his eyes about not being stabbed out of the blue by a spy). She tells him about the Avengers Initiative, and about the slightly negatively skewed evaluation she’d been ordered to write, because Fury didn’t want him too close to the WSC. She tells him about Coulson being asked to babysit while he figured out the new element. She tells him of SHIELD’s interest in the Iron Tech. His scowl grows heavier and heavier as every manipulation is so obviously laid bare, and she sees the self-recrimination etch itself deep into his face  _(apparently they’d both had some blinders on)_ but he listens without comment, and when she is finally done, he sits back with a sharp look in his eye.

He guesses, immediately, that she has just staked her entire reputation, career, and possibly her safety, with SHIELD to tell him this. What he cannot seem to guess is  _why,_ judging by the little furrow between his brows. It is obvious that he expects her to ask for something now, to curry favor somehow, but she just shakes her head and takes a deep breath. “It’s not like that.” They are both quiet for a very long moment. “I’m... broken,” she finally murmurs, pulling him in for a kiss. He goes willlingly, seemingly aware that, for now, this is less about romance and more about a connection, an explanation that cannot be put into words. An explanation that goes something like -  _I’m broken... and I think you might be too._

When he pulls back, and the look in his eye says he understands, she knows she has made the right choice.

——

_She is twenty-seven when she learns to start living again._

x

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you!


End file.
